In October 2010, Drizzle had 13,478 total contributions, 96 total contributors, and 37 active contributors.[6] It was also announced that Drizzle had entered Beta,.[7] The first GA version was released in March 2011.[8] Drizzle has actively participated in the Google Summer of Code Project since 2010.[9][10][11][12]

Drizzle is a re-designed version of the MySQL v6.0 codebase and is designed around a central concept of having a microkernel architecture. Features such as the query cache and authentication system are now plugins to the database, which follow the general theme of "pluggable storage engines" that were introduced in MySQL 5.1. It supports PAM, LDAP, and HTTP AUTH for authentication via plugins it ships. Via its plugin system it currently supports logging to files, syslog, and remote services such as RabbitMQ and Gearman. Drizzle is an ACID-compliant relational database that supports transactions via an MVCC design.[14]

Database triggers in Drizzle are supported for DML, DDL, and a number of additional event-based operations in the server. The PrimeBase BLOB streaming system, which allows Drizzle to stream binary large objects (BLOBs) via HTTP, makes use of this system. All triggers for Drizzle currently must be written in C++.

Replication in Drizzle is done by generating "messages" using the Google Protocol Buffers library. These messages are then stored and executed on remote servers. The message format is a non-SQL neutral format which has allowed Drizzle to have replication appliers to RabbitMQ, Memcached, MySQL, Voldemort, and Apache Cassandra.